Re: Trollspeak

At 4:19 pm -0500 25/2/99, Brian Betty wrote:
>On 2-25-99, Ray Brown wrote: "Yes, the Trolls appear in Chapter II of 'The
>Hobbit' and they speek neither 'BBC English' nor "the Queen's English" :)
>But there is nothing there to make it Cockney rather than any of the many
>other 'sub-standard' (NOT my term) dialects of England."
>
>Right. I wasn't addressing that argument, I was just trying to show that if
>people are dragging in motivation for use of Cockney, the trolls' use of
>funky colloquial forms might have informed the casting company ...
If the casting company had actually read Chap.II of "The Hobbit", they'd
have found "...William was a-thinking of..." which you'd not hear in modern
Cockney.  That usage is archaic and, if it still lingers on, is far more
likely to be found in a rural dialect.  Indeed, the Trolls surely are to be
expected to speak some non-standard _rural_ form not the colloquial dialect
of a densely populated _urban_ community.  Communities are simply not
densely populated when Trolls are around - the get eaten!

>and
>although I haven't my books with me, I remember that the goblins of Moria
>in the tower spoke similarly in a 'cute' dialect.
I've skimmed through Chaps. 4 & 5 of Book II of TLOR, where the fellowship
journey through Moria, and can find only one word said by Orcs - "gha^sh"
(fire) - as there were Uruk-Hai with them, it's likely that they were
mostly using the Black Speech and not Westron.

Those Orcs in Chap. 3 of Book III, whom Pippin records as speaking Westron
have their speech rendered by Tolkien in pretty standard English -
certainly none of the "cute non-standard Troll-talk".  And in I've also
checked Chapter 1 of Book VI and I find that Shagrat, Gorbag & the other
Orcs in the Tower of Cirth Ungol in Mordor also are represented in more or
less standard English - there's odd inclusion of words 'Nar' but, yet
again, _nothing_ like the speech of the Stone trolls of the "The Hobbit".

>I don't know what it was
>'intended' to represent,
Tolkien says specifically in Appendix F to LOTR "..and in the Westlands the
Stone-trolls spoke a debased form of the Common Speech."  But in "The
Hobbit" their speech is, in reality, only very moderately - and somewhat
quaintly - 'debased'.

Tolkien was no novice linguistically.  If he'd intended the Stone-trolls to
sound like Cockneys he surely would've included specifically Cockney traits
- 'dropping aitches' is most definitely _not_ a feature confined to
Cockneys; it's found in many other English dialects.  Tolkien does not
include any specifically Cockney features.

As regards the Orcs - in TOLTR their speech is represented in fairly
standard English.  In Appendix F Tolkien says: "So it was that in the Third
Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed [of Orc] the
Westron tongue; and indeed many kindred of the older tribes, such as those
that still lingered in the North and in the Misty Mountains, had long used
the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make
it hardly less unlovely than Orkish."

But Tolkien seems practically no indication as to such Orcs made the
language unlovely.

The Black Speech of Mordor we are told was a conlang devised by Sauron to
be spoken by all creatures that served him.  And although we are not given
full details of the Black Speech, Tolkien does give sufficient to show that
it was about as remote from Cockney as, say, Mandarin Chinese is from
Swahili - i.e. not remotely like it.

Therefore IMHO there is no basis from Tolkien for having Orcs speech 'with
a Cockney accent'.

>but Cockney has been long vilified and might have
>been chosen by the casting company for its impact on the audience.
Indeed, that's the reason I put forward and, if I understood Joel
correctly, it's also what Joel said.

>Not that
>I agree, mind you. I think that's a cheap way out of the situation,
>cheating for an emotional reaction, and a biased one at that.
Certainly it's cheating & cheap.  It's not merely biased - it's an
unwarranted and quite irresponsible perpetuation of a mischievous &
offensive stereotype.

Ray.